Tag: Fulham

It is a warm, sunny evening in West London. The sun sparkles on the Thames in the pre-match aerial shots of Craven Cottage, but there is a sense of calm before the storm in the air. Tonight, Fulham plays host to the biggest match in their history. Sometimes, it helps just to repeat the following sentence in order to assist with letting it sink in. This evening, Fulham play Hamburg SV for a place in the final of the Europa League and it is, of course, a sell-out. It’s also not unwinnable. Hamburg lost 5-1 at the weekend and fired their coach. All is not happy in the north of Germany. But have Fulham, who have already deposited the German champions Wolfsburg and Juventus on their backsides in this competition, got enough in the tank to find their way into the Europa League final? Hamburger Sport-Verein, then. Six times German champions and one-time champions of Europe, in 1983. The team that wrestled Kevin Keegan from Liverpool. The club of Horst Hrubesch, Felix Magath and Manny Kaltz. This is a club that has already won the European Cup and the European Cup Winners Cup, yet still needs this trophy to join the rarified air of clubs that have completed the hat-trick of winning all three European trophies. When much of what we in England see of German football consists of...

The Premier League’s Annual General Meeting this summer will provide stringent salary cap regulations for English football’s top tier, to judge by the plethora of club chairmen who have offered unsolicited opinions in favour of such regulations in recent months. It is refreshing to see such a consensus around an issue of such magnitude, especially coming from a group of people of such sound judgement. West Ham co-owner David Gold has struck a discordant note around the subject. But he has expressed his views with admirable consistency, long before salary caps became the sexy subject in the wake of Portsmouth’s financial demise. As he said on BBC Sport last summer, in opposition to “capping”: “I think you have to be very careful that you don’t go all the way back to 50 or 60 years ago, when Blackpool was the top club in the division, because you’d end up with a very bland league.” That, alongside his view that a “league” is “the survival of the fittest,” is a healthy sign that the debate will be constructive and well-informed, I’m sure you’ll agree. The credibility of the salary cap argument is demonstrated by Fulham chairman Mohamed Fayed being its most fervent supporter. As long ago as last April, Fayed was talking in admirably emotive terms on the subject. “Take my crusade against Sky-high players’ wages,” he told London’s Evening...

Spring is in the air, and the good news stories just keep coming. Former Chester City supporters seem to have a decisive upper hand in their battle to get their own club, run on their own terms. Durham City of the Unibond League end a run of twenty-nine successive defeats with two wins in a row. And now Fulham have beaten Juventus in the UEFA Cup. It wasn’t just a victory, of course. It was a monumental night of drama that started disastrously for them and could have swung either way until the closing seconds, but ended with a sublime goal, one of the best of the season anywhere and the sight of a small (by Premier League standards) club getting to the last eight of a major European competition. When David Trezeguet gave Juventus the lead in the second minute, it seemed to puncture the atmosphere at Craven Cottage. What might, with a tea-time kick-off, have been expected to be a slightly dislocated atmosphere, proved to be anything but, though. Perhaps it the accumulated caffeine imbibed by twenty-odd thousand office workers and the like was still coursing through their veins as kick-off arrived. It took just seven minutes for Bobby Zamora to bring Fulham level, and even then the feeling that there was something in the air was starting to crackle even through the television screens of those...

As quietly as a mouse, spring has sprung. The FA Cup quarter-final between Fulham and Tottenham Hotspur this afternoon is a 5.20 kick-off, but the sun is still glittering on the River Thames behind Craven Cottage as the teams kick off and the football season, which, throughout the winter months, starts to take on the feel of being endless, is starting to feel considerably more finite now.

Fulham brushed aside Manchester United in the Premier League yesterday afternoon with a performance which suggested that 2010 could be a very good year for the London club. Roy Hodgson may be very much from the old school, but his team is thoroughly modern.